Blood Brotherhoods (102 page)

The man who staged the spectacular, demonstrative attack on the Nuvoletta farmhouse was Antonio Bardellino. Bardellino was born in San Cipriano d’Aversa, one of three contiguous agricultural towns (the others are Casapesenna and Casal di Principe) to the north of the Nuvolettas’ base. Generations of illegal building turned these towns into a two-storey maze of unmapped alleys. The area, known for its fruit trees and its buffalo-milk mozzarella industry, had been notorious for more than a century: Mussolini’s repressive drive against the rural camorra in the 1920s was concentrated here.

Although he came from a very traditional camorra territory, Bardellino was something of an upstart compared to the Nuvolettas: he began his career holding up trucks. He was formally a part of the Nuvoletta organisation, and had been put through Cosa Nostra’s finger-pricking initiation in the Marano farmhouse. However, the war between the NCO and the NF quickly created tensions between Bardellino and his masters. As we have seen, both Lorenzo Nuvoletta and Michele ‘Mad Mike’ Zaza were reluctant to commit themselves to the campaign against the Professor. Bardellino, by contrast, opted for a much more aggressive stance. He commanded a committed team of young killers who were one of the Nuova Famiglia’s most efficient fighting forces—and more than a match for the numerically superior NCO. One of Bardellino’s allies at the time recalled that ‘we felt like the Israelis facing up to the Arabs’.

As the war dragged on, further differences between the Nuvolettas and Bardellino surfaced. The Nuvoletta brothers were closely linked to Shorty Riina and the
corleonesi
. Bardellino, on the other hand, was a business partner of some of Shorty’s enemies in the Transatlantic Syndicate, and spent increasing amounts of his time with them, away from Campania, on the narcotics route from South America. Thus the same battle lines that were mapped across Sicily during the Second Mafia War in 1981–3 were now being redrawn across Cosa Nostra’s Campanian territories.

By 1984, the
corleonesi
knew that Bardellino had been continuing to network with surviving Men of Honour from the losing side in Sicily, thus flouting Shorty Riina’s newly established hegemony over Cosa Nostra. Bardellino and his allies, by contrast, were now certain that the Nuvolettas had
adopted a duplicitous waiting strategy during the war against the Nuova Camorra Organizzata. On instructions from Corleone, the Nuvolettas had kept their Family out of the conflict, while Bardellino and his killers bore the brunt of the fighting. The Nuvolettas’ intention was to wait until the Professor and Bardellino had fought one another to a standstill, leaving them free to mop up.

When Bardellino realised that war with the Nuvolettas was inevitable, he came home from his drug-trafficking base in Mexico especially to lead his men against the Marano farmhouse. Later confessions would make it clear that Bardellino’s assault could have been absolutely devastating for the Nuvolettas: the
capo
, Lorenzo Nuvoletta, was due to hold two meetings in his farmhouse at that time, one with his senior commanders and one with the Professor’s sister; a last-minute change of plans saved his life.

Thus the Bardellino-Nuvoletta conflict of 1984 was a restaging of the Sicilian war of 1981–3, only on Neapolitan soil. This time, however, the outcome was different.

After the success of the assault on the Nuvoletta farmhouse, Antonio Bardellino returned to his drug trafficking in South America, leaving the campaign against the Nuvolettas in the hands of his main ally, Carmine Alfieri, known simply as
’o ’Ntufato
—‘Mr Angry’. Alfieri came from another historic stronghold of organised crime in Campania, the cattle-market town of Nola, birthplace of the Italian-American gangster Vito Genovese. ‘Mr Angry’ was a meat trader and loan shark who had grown up amid the middle-class ferocity that characterises the towns of the Neapolitan hinterland: his father was murdered when he was young. He met Raffaele ‘the Professor’ Cutolo in jail, and was later invited to join the Nuova Camorra Organizzata. When he refused, the Professor killed his brother. ‘Mr Angry’ joined forces with the Nuova Famiglia.

‘Mr Angry’ Alfieri proved to be even more spectacularly ruthless than Bardellino. His first major attack on Nuvoletta allies was one of the worst massacres in Italian gangland history. Late on the morning of 26 August, a battered tourist coach pulled up on the main thoroughfare of Torre Annunziata, just outside a fishermen’s club. The streets were crowded with people strolling, or taking coffee, or leaving church. Nobody took any notice of the bus—after all, Torre Annunziata, which lies between Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii and the Sorrento peninsula, was a frequent watering hole for tourist parties. Fourteen killers, carrying a mixture of machine guns, shotguns and pistols, calmly descended the steps of the bus and started shooting at the men playing cards and chatting in the fishermen’s club. Eight people were killed. The club, it turned out, was a regular meeting
place for the Nuvolettas’ local allies, the Gionta clan, whose leader was yet another
camorrista
initiated into Cosa Nostra at the Marano farmhouse.

For Carmine ‘Mr Angry’ Alfieri, the massacre was a military triumph. Intended to damage the Nuvolettas’ prestige as loudly and visibly as possible, it succeeded in its aim. The Nuvoletta clan, who were also reeling from heavy blows inflicted by the police, sued for peace. Cosa Nostra’s authority in Campania crumpled. Many Sicilian construction companies operating in Campania immediately abandoned the region, some without even waiting to finish the projects they were working on.

The war against the Nuvolettas left Carmine ‘Mr Angry’ Alfieri as the most powerful
camorrista
in Campania. But Mr Angry had learned the lessons of Cosa Nostra’s colonialism, and of the Professor’s megalomania, and he did not try to impose central control. Alfieri’s camorra was a confederation, as his lieutenant would later explain. ‘Everyone remained autonomous. We weren’t like the Sicilian mafia . . . Every group had its boss, with men loyal to him who were the sharpest and most enterprising.’

Alfieri’s presiding authority finally guaranteed a measure of equilibrium in Campania’s volatile gangland, albeit that the map of organised crime in the region was much more fragmented than it had been at the height of the Professor’s power. In 1983, at the conclusion of the war between the Nuova Camorra Organizzata and the Nuova Famiglia, there were a dozen camorra organisations in Campania. Five years later, in 1988, there were thirty-two, many of them the splinters of the NCO and the NF.

One distinguished victim of the upheaval in the camorra was Mr Angry’s ally, Antonio Bardellino, who did not live long to enjoy the fruits of victory over the Nuvolettas. In Rio de Janeiro, in 1988, he paid the price for abandoning hands-on management of his territory when one of his underlings battered him to death with a hammer. His successors—the young ‘Israelis’ who had been in the vanguard of the Nuova Famiglia during the war against the Professor—would no longer have their boss’s taste for Cosa Nostra–style rituals. The last trace of Sicilian influence over the Campanian underworld was gone. From now on, the camorra had to stand up for itself.

The fragmentation of some camorra clans in the mid-1980s did not mean that the camorra as a whole was less powerful. Quite the contrary. Cutolo’s cultish Nuova Camorra Organizzata, and the fractious Nuova Famiglia that opposed it, certainly had thousands of soldiers and ruled broad expanses of Campanian territory. But because they were only in at the beginning of
the post-earthquake construction bonanza, they never achieved as deep a penetration of the economy and political system as did the more territorially circumscribed clans that came in their wake.

The new camorra groups of the mid- and late 1980s were also the beneficiaries of a whole new phase in the blend of economic growth and political failure in late twentieth-century Italy. The Italian economy returned to growth in the early 1980s. Inflation dropped, and there was a stock-market boom between 1982 and 1987. The big success story of the decade was the north-east and centre of the country where small, often family-run businesses produced specialist manufactures for export: luxury fabrics, high-specification machinery, spectacles, ski boots and so on. By 1987, the Treasury Minister could claim that Italy had overtaken the United Kingdom to become the fifth biggest economy in the world. Italy entered the age of remorseless consumerism, driven by a huge growth in advertising on new private TV stations that offered a bountiful diet of soap operas, game shows, Hollywood movies, sport and stripping housewives.

Beneath the glitzy surface, all was not well with the Italian economy. Tax dodging was widespread. The South retained its chronic problems of administrative inefficiency, poor skills and education, and a lack of inward investment. Submerged, unregulated, untaxed businesses were everywhere. Southerners bought their fair share of Levi’s jeans and Timberland shoes in the consumerist boom. But what they spent tended to come from public funds rather than productive economic activity. Not coincidentally, Italy’s public debt grew inexorably during the 1980s, although the South was by no means the only region responsible for the unrestrained borrowing.

The chief culprits for the debt were the usual suspects: the state and the political system that was supposed to manage it. The old vices of pork-barrel politics, nepotism and clientele-building grew worse in the 1980s—in part because there were fewer restraints. The Communist Party had reached its highest ever percentage of the vote in the 1976 general election. Thereafter, it went into decline, beached by the final retreat of the tide of labour militancy in the early 1980s. The PCI could now only look on from the margins, its leaders bewildered by change.

The decade was dominated by a five-party coalition, centred on the DC and the Socialist Party, which seemed to spend most of its time squabbling over the spoils of office. Endless bargaining, and endless jockeying for position and influence, robbed the executive branch of its ability to make reforms, plan for the future, or put a brake on public spending. The extension of local democracy (Italy’s regional governments began in 1970) only spread the same methods deeper down into society. The parties, and party factions, moved in to place their men in every possible position of influence: from government
ministries, national TV stations and nationalised banks to local health authorities. This ‘party-ocracy’, as it was termed, became entirely self-serving, cutting politics and the state off from the ordinary job of reflecting the people’s will and administering collective services. A new breed of ‘business politician’ emerged: a party functionary or state administrator devoted to systematically taking bribes on public contracts. The business politicians then took home those bribes or, much more often, reinvested them in the sources of personal power: a party or party faction, a clique of friends or fellow Masons. Some money went on conspicuous consumption to advertise political traction and lack of scruple: a big car, a flash suit or a daughter’s lavish wedding. When the occasional corruption investigation hit the headlines, the governing classes united in denouncing the magistrates for political bias.

In the South, but not just in the South, this newly degraded political system was easy prey to the threats and wiles of organised crime. In the ethics-free world of the party-ocracy, criminal organisations became just one more lobby group to buy off. For any given political coterie, as for any given company looking to do business with the public sector, having
camorristi
,
’ndranghetisti
or
mafiosi
as friends became a competitive advantage in the struggle to corner public resources. Even as they became more violent than ever before, more hooked on the profits of narcotics trafficking, the mafia, camorra and ’ndrangheta became more deeply entwined with the state—a state that had occupied more of society and the economy than ever before.

Organised crime had made itself indispensable. Looking back on the growth of the camorra in the 1980s, a parliamentary inquiry into the camorra put it this way in 1993:

In areas dominated by the camorra, society, companies and public bodies tend to become dependent on the camorra organisation. The camorra becomes the great mediator, the essential junction box linking society to the state, linking the market to the state, and linking society to the market. Services, financial resources, votes, or the buying and selling of goods: all are subject to camorra mediation. The camorra’s activities create a generalised ‘rule of non-law’.

The line between criminal business and lawful business had never been as blurred. In the construction sector, it was difficult to discern any line at all.
Camorristi
were newcomers to the building game, but by the early 1980s every major clan could boast its own cement works. Paying kickbacks became routine, as did doling out fat subcontracts.

Naples and the towns of Campania were rebuilt in organised crime’s ghastly image. An entire neighbourhood of 60,000 inhabitants, Pianura near
the Nuvoletta capital Marano, was built using mob money and without a single building licence. The whole of greater Naples, in the words of the parliamentary inquiry’s report,